The present invention relates to Surgical Sponge designs and means for identifying surgical sponges.
Error in the practice of medicine is common and may cause harm to patients. One persistent and poorly understood error is leaving surgical sponges or instruments inside patients who undergo surgery. Incidents of leaving surgical sponges in the patient may result in injury and even death. Some studies suggest that errors of this nature occur in 1 of every 1000 intra-abdominal operations. Understanding why these errors occur leads to various measures of prevention.
Standards exist that have long required that only sponges detectable via radiography be used. The standard requires that sponges are to be counted once at the start and twice at the end of all surgical procedures. If not all sponges are accounted for, radiography and/or a manual re-exploration is performed. Despite the procedural safeguards, foreign bodies go undetected and are left in the patient.
The prior art methods of detection of the foreign objects include the use of radiography. Radiography is employed when counts of surgical sponges are deemed to indicate a miscount or deemed in error. The radiographic screening is ideally performed prior to the patient leaving the operating room. However, the current use of radiography varies widely. Often due to the lack of readily available radiographic equipment and the urgency to process the patient out of the operating room, radiography is not a consistent and thorough means of detection.
The result of inadequate procedures and devices to detect the inadvertently left behind foreign bodies can give rise to expensive malpractice claims expenses alone.
What is needed in the art is a reliable and simplified device and method of tracking surgical sponges in patients.